Trump needs to overcome his tendency to endlessly re-litigate old arguments, and lash out at whoever insulted him an hour ago, to keep his re-election campaign focused on the future. That's the terrain he can win most convincingly upon.
Running on recovery, on what he'll do in 2021, is where Trump wins big. Few outside the hardcore Dem base think walloping American job creators with huge tax increases, looting citizens to give benefits to foreign nationals, and pouring gasoline on racial fires is a smart plan.
Knowing this, Dems will want to bait Trump into squabbling over blame for the coronavirus pandemic or responding to personal insults. They don't want voters thinking about how the guy who delivered the economy Democrats said was impossible is the better bet for recovery.
Likewise on the social issues. Dems don't want voters thinking about where their rhetoric leads, what happens to the country if radicals and extremists are in charge. Grievance politics is all about sacrificing the future to dream about the past and fight over the present.
Donald Trump is your one and only choice if you want the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, and even resistance to tyranny to continue in America, and he can prove it. All of those things are impediments to socialism, cancel culture, mob rule, and the rest.
Focusing on the future, on the re-election agenda, is how Trump can ensure those "shy voters" turn out on Election Day. Even more importantly, it's how he can help them overcome their shyness and begin supporting and reinforcing each other.
Look, we all know there's real atmosphere of intimidation in the country today. Those who oppose the Left have legitimate reasons to fear getting swarmed online, losing their jobs, and even suffering violent attacks. Messages have been sent that the law won't protect you.
It is very dangerous to allow that atmosphere to persist, assuming the shy voters are fed up with this insanity and will turn out in droves to vote. The vote-suppressing effect of feeling that it's all over, that you're taking a risk just to cast a futile protest vote, is huge.
Many of those shy voters are sick of vicious political arguments with totalitarian leftists. Filling them with disgust and a sense of futility was a deliberate part of the years-long intimidation campaign. Wars are won by draining the adversary of the will to fight.
Those sickened hard-working center-right voters are not eager to sign up for another ugly squabble over a controversial Trump tweet, pandemic policies from April, or even what certain Obama officials did in 2016 - but they'll talk to each other about the agenda for 2021.
Trump's unique political strength is his ability to tap populist and nationalist energy. The former was long ago ruled out of bounds for Repubs by the political and media elite (but it's still meat and drink for Dems.) The latter is forbidden to Americans, but not foreigners.
Use those strengths to promote the 2021 agenda, and make it big and bold. Now is the time to talk about everything the Dems long ago intimidated Republicans out of discussing - public education, the entire tax system, progressive racism, freedom of speech, all of it.
This is the time to put everything on the table, to remind Americans they aren't slaves to a system largely imposed without their consent. We need to remember that we are giants. We need to be as strong and brave as we were the last time fascism threatened to devour the world.
We can't come back from the pandemic with a double dose of the Dem policies that made us weak and divided. The world's greatest welfare state will be no match for the new evil empire. They'll laugh and push a tottering Green New Deal wreck over like the house of cards it is.
Trump can show voters that Dem ideology is a bridge to the past, an endless war over things that happened 20, 50, 100, 400 years ago. People sick of vicious arguments, weaponized grievance, and street violence can get behind that.
But it takes discipline to talk about the future, to stay on message, to resist getting lured into fleeting arguments and win rhetorical victories that satisfy for a few hours and then melt away. Nothing can be build on sand, especially the kind that runs through an hourglass.
It's almost impossible to keep an entire team - campaign staff, surrogates, allies, officials - on message if you're not firmly committed to a vision of the future. Trump has long had trouble with that. He can overcome it by going big on 2021. /end
